Is Proxmox Nessassary

[Music] M sa Philippines SOS angah hat in this video I'm going to be discussing the need for prox Mar or my need for prox MOX apparently so stay tuned uh just got up here this morning I was checking my uh fermenting peppers down below actually it's fermenting peppers and mangoes and onions and garlic and a few other things it's been going for about a week now got that nice sour smell going no mold or mildew growing so it's going along good lots of CO2 production another couple weeks I'm going to be uh turning it into a uh mango pepper sauce won't be terribly hot but it should be interesting and like I said that's going to be probably about a week to 10 days from now because it's been going about a week now so anyway back to the subject at hand let's get to our [Music] video all right in this video I'm going to try and be taking an unbiased as possible look at the need for prox MOX I want to discuss some of the disadvantages and advantages and in addition to prox MOX probably be looking at other guis like cockpit webmin there's a few of them out there I do want to be clear here I am not talking about the desktop Windows Manager this is strictly supporting servers remotely either via web GUI or through remote shell like SSH arguments about client interfaces are subjects for another time like I say not talking about your personal computer your desktop computer this is strictly a server-based discussion now that I've been working with proxmox for a while I've probably not as done as much as I should with libbert directly so I should really probably be foregoing too far along do some more experimenting with that but I have done a lot of work with Samba configuration and I've actually just recently published a video about setting up a raid array manually using the command line so other than the virtual machine part of it actually creating networking all that stuff I think I've got a pretty good handle on the need for a GUI or not interestingly I find the GUI my experience with cockpit and proxmox have their own learning curve maybe not as steep as a command line but it is there I remember back in the day oh long time ago Windows nt4 days yeah probably a lot of you don't remember those but when I was building servers back then it was all done by the command line there was really no GUI I think webman was around back then but it wasn't in a very what I would consider a stable usable form but yeah it's only on the last year or so that I've started using guis on my servers the first experience I had with the cockpit was when I built a Plex Media Server for my son it's still running at his place so I must have done something right I can still access it even from here the GUI there was mainly if my son had to do some maintenance on it in my absence that's another series of videos you can look at if you want to scroll back to the past there was I think four five or six of them something like that anyway in this video we're strictly looking at managing servers remotely so we need to think of terms of things we do with the web server before we can actually come to any sort of conclusion about the need for web gooey or not all right let's do it all right let's jump right into the subject at hand what do I do with my servers uh well that's changed over the years but first thing I do I've built a lot of Samba servers uh SMB cifs for file sharing with my relatives who are windows only users because they want on the network and sometimes they want access to certain resources uh mini DLNA is another thing I've do with my servers lately this is a small little program it doesn't have a GUI so that sort of I don't know if it's non sec or not but uh mini DL DN mini DLNA will run the uh universal plug andplay protocol and DLNA and this will allow a lot of smart devices like TVs to connect directly to your file server and play your media without a complex interface gaming uh m test currently I've been sort of disappointed in the direction Minecraft has been going lately and I still need to cater to my nieces and nephews who like playing this game uh some of them have outgrown it but some of them haven't uh VPN tunneling is another thing I do that might not be considered a server but I usually stick it on a separate computer big purpose there is getting through uh the cgnet that my ISP uses back when I was in the states I didn't have cgnet so that wasn't really a necessity but it is here uh DNS malicious blocking um do this more for blocking malicious sites and for any ad blocking and I like having a local DNS catching server because it does greatly speed up internet browsing especially since my ISP has gotten into blocking some stuff so that's pretty much necessity a backup system I usually set up a system and this wouldn't have to be a server but it's basically a computer I can attach USB storage to and I can access it across the land this usually relates back up to the samba above because I usually create sash shares where the USB drives hard drives will show up when they plug them in uh HTML the lamp Linux Apache MySQL PHP or however it stands for these days not so much anymore I haven't been doing web servers for two three four years now so yeah that's probably not a high priority right now so actually taking a look at what I actually do with my servers now we can discuss what do I need a GUI for so let's jump into Samba uh I can set this up with more control more options and faster in the terminal I know that Samba default configuration file a lot of a lot of distros send out with them is kind of scary to look at it's long you can actually do a S configuration file about 7 to 10 lines so yeah I could do that faster than the terminal I already mentioned the mini DLNA does does not have a GUI so that has to be set up in the terminal as far as my mind test server there's been some development going on around web guis and things but I have not seen one yet that I would use in production for bpn tunneling uh with Cloud flared I currently set things up manually through the terminal locally I mean you can do this remotely from the cloud flared site but I seem to prefer to do it manually through my terminal by creating a file on my own machine to control this uh DNS malicious blocking I use py hole py hole has its own uh guey so yes it has a goey and I've never played around with using it without a gooey and I don't even know if that's possible I also use Unbound with it but Unbound is another terminal configuration application backups again USB drive Mount Point set up as a Samba share see Samba above and HTML lamp servers I really have not been doing those so but in the past that was all manual too setting up the Apache configuration file the PHP any files all that yeah that was all manual too another question I decided to tackle while doing this is why do I need a virtual machine or container for that matter why I mean it adds a level complexity and they run on top of uh the kernel along with the operating system security standard mattra is less is better because they through the guis and through the uh actual uh interface they offer a larger attack surface more on security a little later but again less is better and then resources without careful consideration you can waste a lot of resources when you're assigning hard dis space to a VM nobody else can use it I know some of the space is dynamically assigned you can also do something kind of funny in prox MOX making a bigger hard drive than you actually have I'm not sure how I feel about that this particular one resources in fact a lot of these are prevalent upon your system you're using they're going to be much more important on a lowend system with limited resources performance issues VM CS will never be 100% % performance equivalent with compared to the standalone computers running a dedicated application I'm sorry they can tell you whatever they want it will never be 100% performance equivalent and technically like I said everything here also applies to the guiu layer on top as well more complexity additional security concerns more resources used and performance hits so this all sounds kind of negative for a yet all right I've said a lot of negative things that might make you not want to use a virtual machine server whatever but uh let's do a reality check let's start with the hardware yes there are performance losses but on reasonably powerful newer Hardware they are minimal and generally speaking servers do not run Full Throttle 24/7 in fact they spend a lot of their time slightly above vital and you are probably not going to notice any performance degradation unless you are running your various virtual servers fairly hard I mean it's there but it's like I say unless you're running them hard you're probably not going to see it uh most Modern Hardware also has virtualization settings to help with this and another actual big Plus on the hardware side is reduce the number of actual servers and other network Hardware that you have attached for example in my network up here my home lab I guess you'd call it I was able to go from six computer boxes down to two computer boxes with virtualization this allowed me to also get rid of a network switch so yeah there is a big advantage in Hardware space especially if you're space limited there is a negative side to that this Falls in reality check I don't think I wrote anything down for this but having the ability to create virtual servers or containers on the Fly means you might actually have a lot more than you need spin them up failed to turn them off later you know as far as security issues go if you're a home user you're using a home lab you're on your personal land and you have limited or no internet access to your servers security is not generally going to be a big critical issue for you and again that's assuming you trust everyone who has access to your land and your ISP but I'm assuming you know who's accessing your land I know pretty much everyone accessing my land here and like I say security is not a big deal because these are not directly connected to the internet a GUI is a visual for setup and mainten maintenance for setup and maintenance it gives you a lot of control a lot of easy control however it doesn't give you all the possible control options you can get from the command line but for the majority of tasks you're going to perform yeah it makes things a little easier because you got a visual representation monitoring this is where the programs like cockpit and proxmox really shine it's easier to monitor your server via GUI both past and present data I know in the past for a quick check you'd run I'd run like top from the command line uh I save off data to comma separated values or CSV files and Export those and load them up in Excel to do graphs and things uh yeah most of the guis do this stuff for you already and you don't have to worry so much about it so that's a big Advantage Plus and this needs to be said a GUI does not negate the terminal in both cockpit and in uh proxmox two I've been using the most lately GUI is available through your web interface uh now the exception is the raspberry uh the pie hole pie hole is the exception it doesn't have a GUI available in its web interface but you can SSH into the server and get a command line that way so yeah guis do not negate the terminal okay I thought i' finish this up I take a look at what I'm actually using in my home lab just to give you an idea and show you don't need uh fancy high-end equipment for this so at the very start I've got this hooey uh router this is a fiber optic router it's from my ISP which is converge and it's your standard router it also serves the rest of my house not just the home lab but yeah it's this is where it starts you can see we've got it's got a built-in switch it also got a port for a USB storage this actually if I wanted to use that would be would be uh FTP access the problem here is I'm using a dual hard drive Dock and a single hard drive dock works great a dual not so great and here on the bottom we have our Optical input next is my main uh computer I'm using for virtualization this is a 6 plus I think it is it's got a uh ryzen nice ryzen processor in there 16 cores 32 gigs of memory it's working pretty good so far as a virtual machine it's quiet I may have to do a review on this one I got this one as a gift from my son but there are a few I mean overall I I like it but there are it does have a few issues I may I did a article on this a while back I may do a video on it later next up this was actually my main computer it's a eighth generation Nook I've used this for a long time as my main computer it's got a I5 Intel for Cores uh four threads so eight logical processors uh it's only got 16 gigs of memory but it's still enough to run couple virtual machines or containers and um probably going to be using this one for my file server and hook it up as my backup server both on this machine and oh this one has the hood on it yeah the hood that gives you an extra ethernet port and a usb3 port however the ethernet port is ethernet to USB because it plugs into a USB header on the main board inside and here is my Hardware solu my Hardware backup solution this is a dual Bay hard drive dock it'll take 2.5 or uh 3in hard drives you can actually clone drives with this it's a USB 3 so it's not the fastest thing in the world but it's not slow either and then as far as my backup media goes I have a bunch of solid state drives 2.5 in spinning drives and some uh 3 and 1 12 inch drives these I use for I'm using now for my backups so gives me a lot of backup potential here all right there we have it that's a quick video uh I'm not sure how useful it was but it's just something I felt like I needed to talk about because I know a lot of people you well again a lot of people promote a lot of these products it's jumping on the bandwagon on what's popular I mean the solution is working for me right now I'm not sure if I'm going to stay with proxmox or go back to a cockpit or a combination of both but there are issues and if you're going to do these these things or use these products you need to be aware that there are issues it's not all roses so I just wanted felt they needed to highlight that before moving on the next video I'm going to do is going to focus on the creating users in prox Mox and some of the fun and interesting ways you they went about this particular task so that'll be coming up next video so stay tuned again great for all of you to be here subscribe comment like uh I'm not really pushing this channel cuz I'm not doing it for a profit Center things but it's always nice to be appreciated thank you [Music] bye [Music]

Channel: RetiredTechie

Views: 6,525

Keywords: proxmox, GUI, server, needs, use cases

Id: 81-W6x5Ur5o

Length: 19min 15sec (1155 seconds)

Published: Mon Feb 19 2024